[Free Templates] How to Manage Influencer Marketing with Spreadsheets

If you’re running influencer marketing for your brand right now, chances are you’re already using a spreadsheet. And that’s a great place to start. A well-designed sheet can handle everything from influencer discovery to reporting back to your team.

In this article, we're bringing you four spreadsheet templates to help you manage influencer marketing:

• Gifting tracker – log what you’ve sent, shipping details, and whether the influencer posted.
• Ambassador & affiliate sheet – manage discount codes, commissions, payouts, and ROI.
• Challenge tracker – keep tabs on short-term contests and rewards inside your community.
• Leadership dashboard – roll everything up into a high-level view you can share with execs.

These read-to-edit templates are best paired with a clear strategy for building long-term influencer relationships, not just one-off campaigns. If you’d like a playbook for that, check out this video on how to build your influencer marketing community.

Platform vs. spreadsheet: Which one makes sense for you?

Spreadsheets are a natural first step. They’re free, flexible, and easy to share. If you’re early in influencer marketing, they give you just enough structure to track outreach, gifting, and performance without adding cost or complexity.

But there comes a point where spreadsheets start to feel limiting. Not because they’re “bad,” but because your program outgrows them. That’s when a dedicated influencer marketing platform like SARAL begins to make sense.

Here’s a simple way to think about it:

Stick with spreadsheets if…

• Volume is low. You’re managing fewer than ~30–40 influencers at once, and campaigns are straightforward.
• Budget is tight. You’d rather keep software spend at zero and invest in product seeding or content.
• Process is evolving. You’re still figuring out what to track, which KPIs matter, and how influencer marketing fits into your overall mix.
• Collaboration is simple. One person (or possibly two) handles influencer work, so there’s no need for advanced permissions or workflows.

Choose a tool if…

• Scale increases. You’re managing 50+ influencers across multiple campaigns or platforms.
• Data matters. You need to see real-time performance (clicks, conversions, ROI) instead of manually updating columns.
• Team involvement grows. Leadership, social managers, and finance all need visibility into influencer performance.
• Time is the bottleneck. Updating sheets, chasing links, and formatting reports takes more than a few hours each week.

For now, if you’re here reading this, spreadsheets are probably the right fit. And with the templates in this guide, you’ll have a solid system until you’re ready to level up.

Gifting tracker sheet

Product seeding is usually the first step in building long-term influencer relationships.

You send products out for free and watch what happens: who actually tries them, who enjoys them enough to share with their audience, and who shows potential to become a long-term partner.

The goal here isn’t to squeeze out one post. Focus on identifying the people who find your product genuinely useful, and who might keep talking about it even when you’re not pushing them.

This first spreadsheet helps you keep all that organized.

Column structure for gifting tracker sheet

Here are some useful columns to have this sheet:

• Influencer name
• Platform & handle
• Contact info
• Audience size/niche
• Outreach status (not contacted, contacted, accepted, declined)
• Last contacted date
• Product sent (SKU, size, etc.)
• Shipping details (address, tracking number, ship date)
• Product value
• Posted? (yes/no + link to content)
• Notes

👉 Check tab 2 of this template for a starter layout you can adapt.

Pro tips for using your gifting tracker sheet

Once your sheet is live, here are a few ways to make it more powerful:

• Use conditional formatting to color-code the “Posted?” column. Green for yes, red for no—it makes progress easy to scan.
• Create a filter view that shows only the influencers who posted. This makes it easy to spot candidates for affiliate or ambassador programs.
• Keep a running total of “Product value.” This gives you quick visibility into how much you’ve invested in gifting so far.
• Capture context in notes. Things like “loved the packaging” or “asked for kids’ sizing” might feel small, but they help personalize future conversations.

Handled this way, your gifting tracker becomes more than a log of shipments—it’s the first filter that tells you who really cares about your product and who’s worth building with.

💡 Quick note:

If you’re just starting your influencer program, you don’t need to set up every sheet right away. Begin with the gifting tracker—it’s the most important first step. Bookmark this blog (or email it to your team) so you can come back for the other sheets later. Don’t feel pressured to build everything at once. Start small, and add more structure as your program grows.

Ambassador & affiliate sheet

After you’ve seeded products and logged the initial content, some creators will stand out. They posted quickly, their audience responded well, and they seemed genuinely excited about your brand.

These are the people you want to invite to your ambassador program, a longer-term engagement where you pay them a percentage of the sales they drive.

Column structure for ambassador sheet

At this stage, your sheet needs to track both the human side (who they are, how engaged they are) and the performance side (what revenue they’re driving, what it costs you).

Here’s a simple column structure that covers both.

• Influencer name
• Platform & handle
• Affiliate/ambassador status (invited, active, paused)
• Unique discount code/affiliate link
• Commission rate (%)
• Discount offered to their audience
• Payouts (amount owed / amount paid)
• Posts per month (to measure consistency)
• Sales driven (revenue from code/link)
• ROI (revenue ÷ payouts or commission cost)
• Payout status (pending/paid)
• Notes (special perks, product preferences, or agreements)

👉 Head to tab 3 in this sheet to see how this looks like.

Pro tips for using your ambassador tracker sheet

How to get the most out of this sheet:

• Spot rising stars. Sort by ROI, not just sales volume. A smaller creator with high ROI might be more efficient than a big one that costs more to incentivize.
• Close the loop with content. Add links to standout posts alongside sales data. That way you see not just who drove sales, but what kind of content did it. It helps you brief others better and repurpose winning posts.
• Watch for inactivity. Sort by “posts per month” and highlight anyone who hasn’t posted in 60+ days. It’s an easy way to know who might need a nudge—or to decide if they’re worth keeping.
• Identify top-tier ambassadors. Influencers with strong ROI and consistent posting are candidates for deeper partnerships—retainers, co-branded campaigns, or exclusivity deals.

Challenges tracker sheet

Once you’ve built an active group of ambassadors, the next step is keeping them engaged. Challenges are a great way to do this.

A challenge is a short-term campaign where you set a specific goal for your ambassadors—like selling a certain number of products, posting a set amount of content, or joining a seasonal theme (for example, “Holiday Gift Guide” or “Back-to-School”). In return, influencers get rewards: extra commission, free products, or even public recognition.

The best way to manage them is with a dedicated sheet for each challenge. That way, you don’t end up with one bloated file trying to cover everything at once.

For a challenge sheet to be practical, the goal has to be:

1. The same for everyone.
2. Easy to measure with the data you can actually get.

Column structure for challenge tracker sheet

In a challenge sheet, each row is a participating influencer, and the columns track their progress:

• Influencer name
• Platform & handle
• Unique code/link (if sales-based)
• Progress (sales to date, posts submitted, clicks, etc.)
• Target (goal they need to hit)
• Reward (bonus payout, free product, spotlight)
• Status (on track, completed, winner, etc.)
• Notes (creative highlights, audience feedback, special mentions)

👉 You’ll find a ready-to-use version in Tab 4 of this template.

How to get the most out of your challenge sheet

The sheet is only useful if you update and use it regularly, not just at the end. Here’s how to make it work in practice:

• Start with clear rules. Before you launch a challenge, make sure every influencer knows the goal, the target, and the reward. This avoids confusion later.
• Update progress often. Don’t wait until the end to fill in numbers. Update daily or weekly during the challenge so you can see who’s on track and who might need encouragement.
• Share updates back. Take a screenshot of the leaderboard and send it to participants mid-way. Seeing where they stand motivates people to push harder.
• Double-check data sources. If you’re tracking clicks, pull them from the same dashboard every time. Double-check before sharing results so influencers feel the process is fair.
• Close strong. As soon as the challenge ends, update the final numbers, announce winners, and give rewards quickly. Delays kill excitement.

Leadership dashboard sheet

This sheet is for sharing the big picture with leadership, investors, or anyone who just needs to know, “Is our influencer marketing working?” It pulls together the key numbers from your gifting, content, KPI, and ambassador sheets into one overview.

Column structure for the leadership dashboard sheet

Each row represents a campaign or quarter, showing totals and averages rather than post-by-post details:

• Time period / Campaign name – (e.g., “Q1 2025” or “Black Friday 2025”).
• Influencers activated – total number of creators seeded or active in that period.
• Posts published – total content pieces that went live.
• People reached (estimated impressions) – high-level audience size.
• Traffic (unique visitors) – visits driven to the site.
• Orders – number of purchases attributed to influencers.
• Revenue generated – sales tied to influencer activity.
• Content value – estimated earned media value (based on CPM).
• Spend / investment – seeding cost, commissions, flat fees.
• ROI / ROAS – revenue ÷ spend.
• Top performers (optional sub-table) – list of top 3–5 influencers by revenue or traffic.
• Notes / insights – 1–2 bullet summary (“TikTok drove 70% of reach,” “Black Friday campaign exceeded ROI target”).

To keep this useful, resist the temptation to over-engineer it. Add one row per campaign or per quarter, so you can compare performance over time. Pair the numbers with a simple chart—like impressions, ROI, or posts published—so trends stand out at a glance.

This way, the leadership dashboard becomes your go-to sheet whenever someone asks how influencer marketing is performing, without dragging them through all the details.

💡 Resource: We’ve put together a free template that combines all the trackers mentioned above into one sheet. You can make a copy and start using it right away.

[Template] Influencer marketing management sheet

Keerthana Shivaraman, Co-founder of Growcomm, shared with us a template designed to cover the full lifecycle of a campaign—from big-picture goals to day-to-day execution.

This template has four tabs:

• Brand SOP tab: a place to keep contracts, brand guidelines, and media rights. Add cloud links so they’re easy to access.
• Goal setting tab: log each campaign goal with its priority, who owns it, and the current status. Use color codes (on track, at risk, delayed) to make updates easy to scan.
• QC & nurture tab: track influencer details, engagement rates, outreach steps, and payment terms. This helps keep quality checks and relationship management in one place.
• Track & deploy tab: record live campaign activity. Each row covers an influencer activation with links, impressions, conversions, payments, and status.

The idea is to bring planning, vetting, and performance tracking into one sheet, instead of juggling separate trackers. You can download the full template here.

The limits of spreadsheets

If you came to this article hoping to find a set of spreadsheets that completely removes the work from influencer marketing, here’s the truth: that’s not possible.

Spreadsheets are powerful, and with the right formulas and templates, they can take you a long way. But even the best-designed sheet has limits.

• Performance data has to be copied in by hand—no real-time updates.
• Easy for mistakes to creep in (missed rows, broken formulas, duplicate entries).
• Difficult to manage once multiple teammates need to edit at the same time.
• No built-in reminders or automations for follow-ups.
• Can’t centralize content assets (screenshots, videos) neatly—links get scattered.
• Reporting takes time (copy-pasting into charts or decks instead of live dashboards)

At some point, you’ll find yourself doing things manually that a spreadsheet just can’t handle. That’s where a tool like SARAL comes in.

If you’re comfortable with spreadsheets for now, keep using them. We’re not saying don’t use them. But if at some point you’d like to see what working with a platform looks like, you can always book a demo with SARAL. We’ll show you how it works, and you can decide if and when it’s the right fit for you.

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